A
lawyer gave a brief opinion piece on Canada's public radio, the CBC, in
which he flatly said that criticism of Israel is a form of
anti-Semitism.

I guess we should be grateful that people
in Canada are much less violent in their opinions than people in the
U.S. where one lawyer wrote an essay, published on the Internet,
seriously advocating the execution of the families of those who commit
terrorist acts in Israel. Another American lawyer, a very prominent one,
has advocated protocols governing the legal use of torture in the United
States.

I can't blame the CBC for once
broadcasting what is essentially political smut because, on the whole,
the network is fair, enlightened, and far freer of nasty political
pressure than public radio in the United States. Everyone who makes an
honest effort is entitled to make an honest mistake now and then.

Calling people names because you dislike
their views is not logic and is not any form of argument. It is not even
decent. I can't see how this lawyer's words differ from American Senator
McCarthy using the dangerously-loaded slur, Communist, applied to anyone
he didn't want working in the State Department or in Hollywood.

If I indulge this lawyer's name-calling,
saying it resembles logic, what comes to mind is another lawyer's
argument at the trial many years ago of a man who had slashed a woman's
throat and then tried to strangle her with a lamp cord. That lawyer
claimed his client had only been applying a tourniquet to a wound he
accidentally inflicted.

This lawyer's fantasy argument is that the
very selectivity of Israel's critics ipso facto proves their
anti-Semitism. Why aren't these same people out criticizing China about
Tibet he demanded? Apart from the fact that many of them do criticize
other injustices in the world - a fact which makes the lawyer's words
into the cheap trick of a straw-man argument - one has to ask just whom
he includes in his indictment?

Does he include decent, honorable people
like Uri Avnery, former member of the Knesset, a citizen of Israel who
writes regularly of the injustices committed by the country he loves?
Does he include the great pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim who
grew up partly in Israel and has many times criticized its policies?
Does he include the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom who expressed his
rejection of Sharon's brutality? Does he include Desmond Tutu and Nelson
Mandela who both have described what they see in Israel as the apartheid
with which they are intimately familiar?

All people supporting any cause must be
selective. You can't focus on the facts if your attention is distributed
among fifty causes, and advocacy or criticism without facts is vacuous.
Gandhi had a focus as did Martin Luther King as did Tutu as did all the
early Zionist leaders as did Arafat. Taking on every injustice in the
world plainly makes it impossible to say much to the point about any of
them.

So why does anyone focus on Israel? In
part, for the simple reason that we are overwhelmed with awareness of
Israel in our press. A day almost cannot pass that we do not have a news
story about Israel. The slightest statement of Ariel Sharon is reported
with about the same weight as the words of major world statesmen. We
hear of every change in his cabinet. We hear of every change in his
plans. We hear of every meeting he has with other leaders. When was the
last time you read or heard a story about Tibet?

As a quick check of the intuitive truth of
this claim, do a Google search of leaders' names. At this writing, a
search of Sharon turned up 24,700,000 references. A search for Blair
turned up 24,400,000. Bush, which includes two presidents of the United
States plus governors and cabinet posts, nets us 88,700,000 references.
China's leader, Hu Jintao had 770,000 references. All of these searches,
of course, include people other than the individual in question, but the
world's population of Sharons is not large.

The population of Israel is a fraction of
the size of cities like Shanghai or Mexico City. Its population is
roughly the size of Guatemala's or Ecuador's or that of Ivory Coast. How
many stories do you read or hear about these places? Can you name the
Mayor of Shanghai or the President of Ecuador? The mayor of Shanghai,
one of the world's largest cities, is a man by the name of Han Zheng.
That name rang up 304,000 references, but with China's huge population
sharing something on the order of only about a hundred traditional
family names, those references include many people who are not even
distantly related to the mayor.

Why would it surprise any thoughtful
person that Israel is far more on people's minds than Tibet? But the
question of focus on Israel involves far more than constant repetition,
important as that fact is.

A good deal of the mess that we find
ourselves in today, the so-called War on Terror and the deaths of tens
of thousands of innocent people, largely pivots on Israel's policy and
behavior towards the Palestinians and on America's policy towards
Israel. The problem of Israel versus the Palestinians has become a kind
of geopolitical black hole which threatens to consume much of the energy
and substance of Western society. Surely, we all have a right, and even
a moral obligation, to address such a threatening situation without
being called names.

Why doesn't Israel just make peace? Israel
holds virtually all the cards. The weapons. The intelligence
information. The economic advantages. The immensely powerful ally. At
least certainly compared to the pathetic group of people, the
Palestinians, it calls its enemy.

The pointless destruction of Iraq, with at
least a 100,000 civilians killed, a reign of terror unleashed, and the
loss of some of civilization's greatest ancient artifacts was never
about oil. It was intended to sweep Israel's most formidable,
traditional opponent from the map. Never mind that Hussein no longer had
any threatening weapons (a fact confirmed by experts several times
over), and never mind that Iraqis suffered horribly under
American-imposed sanctions for a decade.

Hussein was nasty but no nastier than
dozens of thugs with whom the U.S. has comfortably done business since
World War II. Power is what always takes precedence over principles in
these matters, and Hussein opposed some American policies. Israel's
policy has followed the same path. For instance, Israel worked closely
with the apartheid government of South Africa, heavily engaging in trade
and military assistance. The South African atomic bomb, which quietly
and quickly vanished with the changeover in government, unquestionably
was the fruit of Israeli cooperation. Israel received its early
assistance in creating atomic weapons from France in exchange for
important support around France's battles in its (now former) North
African colonies.

So what do we hear from Sharon, as
American Marines turn the once-thriving city of Fallujah into a rubbish
pile, as horrific resistance bombs keep ripping apart Baghdad? Sharon,
time after time, tells us the United States also should invade Syria and
Iran. To intimidate Syria, he has Israeli Air Force planes buzzing the
presidential palace in Damascus, the only reason Syria is buying
short-range anti-aircraft missiles from Russia, missiles to which Israel
strenuously objects. What would the news stories here be were Syrian
planes capable of doing the same thing in Tel Aviv?

Is Israel the only country somehow
magically immune to Lord Acton's dictum about power? I think not, but in
saying that I risk being classified an anti-Semite.

John
Chuckman lives in Canada and is
former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. Copyright (C)
2005 by John Chuckman.